Paul Alexander, 80, and his grandson Daniel, 14, will be part of the commemorative cycle ride from Berlin to London to mark Kindertransport’s 80th anniversary.
Photograph: World Jewish Relief/PA

The last time Paul Alexander was at Harwich port in Essex, he was 19 months old and Europe was braced for war. In Leipzig, in eastern Germany, Alexander’s distraught mother had handed her precious child to a stranger on a train, desperate to save him from the horrors that lay ahead.

Paul Alexander on his first birthday. He was 19 months old when he was brought to England on the Kindertransport, six weeks before the outbreak of the second world war. Photograph: World Jewish Relief/PA

Forty-two cyclists will leave Berlin on Sunday and arrive in Harwich on a ferry from the Hook of Holland next Friday. There they will begin the final leg of their 600-mile journey to Liverpool Street station in the city of London, where a ceremony will be held in front of a statue depicting young Jewish refugees.

The bike ride, organised by World Jewish Relief, is to commemorate the 80th anniversary later this year of the first Kindertransport to arrive in the UK.

In the days after Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany in November 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, agreed to the temporary admission of unaccompanied, mostly Jewish, children from Germany and elsewhere.

They were placed in foster homes, schools, hostels and farms, and many were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust. Among those saved was Alf Dubs, later a Labour MP and now a peer, who in recent years has campaigned for the UK to admit unaccompanied refugees from Syria and other conflict zones.

Alexander said: “For me, this is a sort of victory ride. A victory in the sense that I survived and I’ve had a good life. I came out of the Nazi terror to freedom and safety, and to me this is a victory.”

In 1938, his father was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, and his mother – who had already lost two babies in childbirth – took the “terribly, terribly difficult decision” to send her only child to safety.

“She must have thought, ‘I have to do whatever I can to save this boy’. She put me on a train not knowing if she’d ever see me again. It’s hard to imagine what was going through her head,” said Alexander.

He was taken to a home for refugee children near London. Meanwhile, his father was released from Buchenwald on condition he left Germany. He went to the UK, where he was interned in a camp. His mother also made it to England, arriving destitute on 1 September 1939, the day war commenced.

The octogenarian will be cycling with his son, Nadav, and 14-year-old grandson, Daniel, with his wife travelling in a support vehicle. “I’m determined to do it. I’m very active – swimming, tennis, cycling – and I’ve been training. I think I’m capable, and it’s going to be an awesome experience.”

Ian Goldsmith’s grandmother, father Saloman (right) and uncle Bruno. The boys were 13 and 12 when they arrived in Harwich on the first Kindertransport. Photograph: Handout

Ian Goldsmith, 56, another cyclist, only discovered his full family history when he applied for a German passport last year in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. He found out his father Saloman, then 13, and uncle Bruno, 12, were on the first Kindertransport that arrived in Harwich in December 1938. The boys’ mother had died of breast cancer, and their father was later killed in a death camp.

Saloman, who died in 1977, “never spoke about his background, and I never asked”, said Goldsmith. “The only inkling I had was that he made me watch a documentary about the Holocaust when I was about 10.”

The brothers were the only ones of 14 cousins, aunts and uncles to survive the Nazi persecution.

Phil Harris, who is making the 600-mile ride in memory of his grandmother, who arrived in Britain at 16 on the Kindertransport. Photograph: Handout

Phil Harris is making the 600-mile ride in memory of his grandmother, Ilse, who arrived in Britain with one small suitcase at the age of 16 – one of the oldest children saved by the Kindertransport.

“I guess [her parents] assumed it would only be a short time until they saw her again,” said Harris, 34. Both were killed in Auschwitz. “Granny never talked about it. My mum only knew the bare bones of the story.”

The night before setting off, Harris will sleep in his grandmother’s former family home in Berlin, now marked with a stolpersteine, a brass plaque in the ground commemorating Nazi victims. “I thought it would be a nice touch to start this journey from the point where Granny started her journey,” he said.

World Jewish Relief, set up in 1933, helped find homes in the UK for Jewish refugee children, and has continued to provide humanitarian relief around the world.

The bike ride was “a tribute to the amazing life-saving work of our predecessors and to the people who they saved. Tens of thousands of people would not be alive today were it not for their heroism,” said Rafi Cooper of WJR.